IT firm hired by Hillary Clinton: It's 'highly likely' there's a backup of emails she deleted

The IT firm hired by Hillary Clinton to oversee her private
server has told
ABC it is "highly likely" a backup copy of the server was
made, meaning any emails Clinton deleted before she handed the
server over to investigators may still be accessible.

Being able to access the deleted emails via a backup server would
most likely make investigators' job much easier, cybersecurity
expert Alex McGeorge of Immunity Inc. told Business Insider on
Friday.

"The reason you back up a server is fairly straightforward, and
it would be standard practice to do so," McGeorge said.

"There's a lot they [investigators] can learn from the server,
but not having the backups would probably make that job much more
difficult."

Having access to the server's backups could also give
investigators "a better timeline," McGeorge said, and allow them
to see whether her private account was ever breached by hackers.

ABC News chief White House correspondent Jonathan Karl said the
firm hired by Clinton in 2013, the Denver-based Platte River
Networks, said it was "cooperating with the FBI.”

Clinton says she deleted roughly 30,000 emails off of her server
that were "personal" in nature before handing over another 30,000
emails to the State Department.

"I was
permitted to and used a personal email and, obviously in retrospect, given all the
concerns that have been raised, it would have been probably smarter not
to," she
told Iowa Public Radio last week.
"But I never sent nor received any classified email, nothing marked 'Classified.' And I think this will all sort itself out."

But authorities sifting through the emails say they have
reportedly found more than
60 emails containing classified information, though it's
mostly at low levels. Those 60 emails did not include two emails
discovered by the intelligence community's inspector general,
Charles McCullough III, which allegedly
contained information classified as Top Secret/Sensitive
Compartmented Information, the government's highest levels of
classification.

Platte River "is not cleared" to have access to classified
material, Cindy McGovern, chief public affairs officer for the
Defense Security Service, told
The Daily Caller.

Consequently, the possibility that any sensitive information was
stored on the server while it was under Platte River's oversight
was "troubling," McGeorge said.

"The fact that Platte River is not a cleared contractor is
largely irrelevant, since they were handling what should have
been unclassified email," McGeorge said. "That classified email
may have been received by a server under their control is
troubling, and they may have been less equipped to deal with it."

Thomson
Reuters

Clinton's unusual email system, currently under investigation by
the FBI, was originally set up by a staffer during Clinton's 2008
presidential campaign. It replaced another private server used by
her husband, former President Bill Clinton.

The new server was run by Bryan Pagliano, who had worked as the
IT director on Hillary Clinton's campaign before joining the
State Department in May 2009. In 2013 — the same year she left the State Department —
Clinton hired Platte River to oversee the system.

"My big issue here is do you want a small firm with little/no
government experience or contracting (according to what's being
reported) and no stated security expertise to be in charge of the
email system for our secretary of state?" McGeorge said.

"That is fundamentally ridiculous."

There is no evidence that Clinton broke the law, but her campaign
is concerned nonetheless.

"They're worried about it," a longtime Clinton adviser and
confidant
told The Washington Post last week. "They don't know where it
goes. That's the problem."